Traffic survey is the basic work for traffic planning and the feasibility study of highways, railways, aviation and other construction projects, and is mainly to fully understand public travel characteristics in the area where the project is located, grasp the traffic volumes, origins and destinations, the model split and other data, and provide basic data for the prediction of the traffic volume or throughput so as to provide reference for the subsequent project construction and evaluation. In a comprehensive transportation system of China, various modes of transportation are managed by different departments. For a planning and design department, it is very difficult to obtain complete transportation statistics, and the data formats and statistical specifications of different modes of transportation are inconsistent and are difficult to aggregate for analysis. The traditional transportation mode survey adopts manual roadside inquiry, sample survey and other manners, which consume a lot of manpower and material resources, and has problems such as limited survey scope and time, low sampling rate and low data processing efficiency.
With the widespread use of mobile phones and the rapid development of the mobile positioning technology, analysis of mobile phone big data has become a new way to obtain transportation statistics. A mobile operator can judge a user's location in real time according to a base station connected with the mobile phone, and a smart phone can also be turned on the GPS positioning function to report its location to mobile phone softwares such as Baidu map. Therefore, a huge amount of users' time and location information can be obtained from the mobile operator and a mobile phone software operator, so that users' travel trajectory, moving speeds and other information can be obtained, and then the transportation mode estimated. Compared with traditional traffic survey technologies, the mobile phone data also has the advantages of wide coverage, large sample size, and capability of long-term continuous monitoring, thereby being able to provide more timely and accurate basic data and decision support for traffic planning and operation.
With the convenience of transportation and the acceleration of urbanization, connections among cities are getting closer and closer, especially between provincial capitals at the economic center positions and trade-prone coastal cities in the same province. Therefore, traffic survey in large inter-city areas is of great significance for transportation planning, operation and even economic development. The current methods either require the use of mobile phone GPS data, or the use of road network data. Although mobile phone GPS data has high positioning accuracy, it is difficult to obtain when users turn off GPS; the road network matching needs detailed road information, which is often difficult to obtain or is obtained incompletely, and requires a large amount of data processing and complex calculation.
Therefore, it is necessary for intercity transportation mode survey to provide a new method with relatively simple calculation and less difficult data acquisition.